As you can see, we have found an actual dinosaur whose name starts with ‘Q’. In addition, this is not a ‘fake’ dinosaur like Pteranodon, but an actual cousin of T-rex and what its discovery told us completely changed paleontology. Qianzhousaurus was from China and Lü Junchang from the Chinese Academy of Geological Science said at the time of its discovery that “the new discovery is very important…”
Qianzhousaurus was a tyrannosaur that lived in China during the Late Cretaceous period, during the same time that T-rex terrorized North America. Previously, there was a new genus of juvenile tyrannosaurs discovered in Mongolia named Alioramus, with two species. However, there were some key features that the first studies kinda overlooked.
Alioramus had a very gracile (thin and flexible) body and longer legs than most tyrannosaurs. It’s head was long and narrow, unlike other tyrannosaurs as well. However, most basal tyrannosaurs from the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous are known to have been very slender and unlike the bulky, heavyweight T-rex or Albertosaurus. Juveniles were also slender and fast, and Alioramus was merely thought to show kiddie traits.
Qianzhousaurus changed this though, as the specimen was older than Alioramus and was a sub-adult (the equivalent of a human college kid), yet it too had the same gracility and narrow skull. Continuing on the statement by Lü Junchang, “…Along with Alioramus from Mongolia, it shows that the long-snouted tyrannosaurids were widely distributed in Asia. Although we are only starting to learn about them, the long-snouted tyrannosaurs were apparently one of the main groups of predatory dinosaurs in Asia.”
As the esteemed scientist tells us, this shows that the tyrannosaurid family was split in two. An analysis of the alioramins, as the family has come to be known, showed two different results: Firstly, the alioramins were closer to T-rex than the Albertosaurines were, contradicting common scientific belief. The second result was that the alioramins were the sister group to Tyrannosauridae, that contained T-rex, Albertosaurus, and their closest relatives. It is still unknown which one is the correct classification, because we don’t know much about the Alioramini.
Anay Ganesh 